Connect & Culture: Two Keys for Innovation

I am teasing a bit here, but you could argue that innovation in your organization is quite simple to manage. You have nice-to-have and need-to-have elements and once you figure out what is what for your organization, you can start finding the right balance for this.

Let me give you an example.

The starting point is that today, innovation is all about networks, ecosystems and partnerships. In short, I call this for Networked Innovation and I have just compiled a free e-book for you on this.?

It’s 40+ pages of insights, tools and exercises with a networking twist on the innovation function. You can download it for free here: Networked Innovation by Stefan Lindegaard

When I was writing and compiling the e-book, two things stood out with regards to the need-to-have versus nice-to-have elements; they are connect versus culture.

# Connect (a need-to-have element)

Any organization needs a steady flow of business and collaboration leads into their innovation pipeline.?

This is a key part of?the execution of innovation?which is about getting (good) ideas and having the processes to bring them to market and/or use in the best possible ways.

How you identify and connect your chosen external partners with relevant people, teams and functions within your organization decides the success of these efforts and thus the tangible outcomes you get.

A few attributes here:

# Understand your innovation needs in the context of your overall corporate strategy. The sweet spots are often in the intersection of what top executives think is needed for the corporate strategy and the more visionary things that trained innovation teams see better than anyone else.

# Identify assets within your organization, ecosystem and industry and make road-maps on how to get access to this. Here you can use tools like disruption radars, trend overviews and in particular data-driven information services.

# Develop tools, vehicles and systems to identify and connect with individuals and their companies/organizations in the above context. This one ties into the culture elements below as you should train your people and organization on networking mindset and skills.

# Culture (a nice-to-have element)

For any organization, it would be nice to have a culture that is geared for innovation. No, I am not talking about an innovation culture and frankly, I think we should ditch this term.?

The idea of having or shaping an innovation culture is ridiculous for several reasons and the key one is that so few organizations have a common language and understanding of what innovation actually means for them. How can you call it a culture if you don’t really know what it is??

What you do have and must relate to is your corporate culture where some, but not necessarily all of your values work well for your innovation efforts.

You can still do lots of work on your culture and we should address this in the right order. As a starter, innovation can only happen in the best ways if you already have a growth mindset. This goes for individuals, teams and organizations.

So, before we talk about innovation and try to do this well, we need to establish a growth mindset and the attributes (such as psychological safety, the curiosity for learning and openness towards experimentation) that come with it.

To often, we see people, teams and organizations talk a lot about innovation, but they struggle mightily on making it happen. This goes for the execution of innovation above which as well as for building the organizational capabilities for innovation.?

The latter is about the infrastructure, settings and corporate culture that supports the execution phase. Both are equally important although there is way too much focus on the execution element in most companies.

Some specific actions for culture include:

# Develop a common language and understanding for your innovation efforts. Make it clear for your employees and external partners so that you avoid too much confusion.

# Implement the growth mindset and other key attributes (psychological safety, curiosity for learning, openness towards experimentation).

# Train your people, teams and your organization on networking mindset and skills. Try to turn networking/collaboration into a true value within your corporate culture. While you are it, you should include your key external partners in these efforts.

There are of course many other elements to consider when it comes to innovation and even so within the connect and culture elements I mention here. To give you an idea of how many elements, you can take a look at my big picture for corporate innovation. See image below.?

Hopefully, you now see that that I was teasing when I said in my introduction to this post that innovation is simple. On the contrary, it is quite complex, but that does not mean we should not try to make it as simple as possible.

For this, I hope my ideas and perspectives here and in the Networked Innovation e-book are useful for your, your colleagues and your ecosystem of partners.